Circus West in Battersea Power Station on shortlist for ‘Britain’s worst building’

The Carbuncle Cup is an architecture award for “Britain’s worst building”, an honour given out annually by Building Design magazine.

“Our six strong shortlist contains a mix of buildings types of differing scales and demonstrates that buildings don’t have to be big to be bad and that poor quality architecture touches all building types,” its website says.

”Circus West pulls off the feat of making Europe’s largest brick building look small and was a very popular nomination with the BD readership. Comments included, ‘A great case of gross over development – it’s disgusting!’, and ‘Now we’re talking…. might as well stop the rest of the nominations being listed. We have a winner right here.’

Many of our readers also pointed out the blame for this building should be shared with Rafael Vinoly who was responsible for the masterplan. Unfortunately this scale of overdevelopment has been forced on the power station because of a series of bad deals made by a series of owners needing to recoup their investments”.